Buchan Days...

...I have been escaping the pressing present to the comfort days of John Buchan. Rather like the ordinand who said he simply could not face the customary Gospels the night before he was priested, but sat up through the hours reading 'Wind In the Willows'.

"I simply couldn't do God that night," he told me. "I needed Ratty and Mole to feel safe." I know just what he means. Sometimes one simply must take that light yet potent escape route - an apposite image for Buchan's tales, as his heroes seem ever to be on the run from the terrible and cunning villains, and who are oft on the point of capture and certain death, yet who unfailingly ever manage the 'one bound and he was free' trick. Lovely stuff.

I believe I am thoroughly versed in most of the major Buchan 'shocker' oeuvre, though until last night I had not, I admit, read a single one. Before though the advent of 'talking books' one had 'reading housemasters', who would while away the post-prep pre-bed hours reading suitable classics to the imprisoned and bored boarders of the School.

Even that long ago, when the English world was essentially static and quite classic, Buchan's time had long passed. He was of one War and we were beyond another. Wish now one could journey back in time and ask of the housemaster what it was that he found so compelling about a man whose tempus et mores so preceded his own. Perhaps it was no more than the eternal love of a good yarn, or derring-do, or bashing a beastly enemy. That taste may vary in flavour, but it does not change in essential and we boys certainly loved it then.

Reading it now I can't pretend my heart doesn't too yearn for some mighty deeds to do, some dark and horrid enemy to be assailed and conquered. And then I look more closely at what Buchan was saying and my heart sinks somewhat at the utter relevance of it all.

For him - as uttered through his characters - there was but a thin veil between the social compact and barbarity in any and so many forms. He saw anarchy as the enemy, the wresting force that would tear it and us all down. As an ex-student, ex-anarchist I believe him more to be speaking of the nihilist. But also of the fanatic.

We have our nihilists. A boy is dead tonight stabbed, as so many others this year, on the streets of London by youths no more than his - or indeed E's - age. Random, bitter, impersonal violence is everywhere. And we too have our fanatics. They are worse than casual killers for they kill for the passion of a cause.

If I speak of Islamic fanatics it is not to single them out as such. There have been Christian fanatic killers and in time - God forbid - perhaps we shall have more atheistic mass murderers. But it is tonight, hearing of the ghastly assassination of Benazir Bhutto, that one particularly thinks of people who will kill for, and in the name of, Islam.

And where in all that does Buchan fit? Well, if you know it not then read his 'Greenmantle' as quick as you might. You might laugh to think there was ever a hope that a European power - his World War One enemy Germany - could ever control such a power of Islamic fundamentalism it sought to unleash. You might rightly baulk at his Anglo-centric notion that everything odd, peculiar and dangerous - never mind plain foreign - began at Dover. But you'd be hard pressed not to suck your teeth and think "Now there's a fellow who seemed to spot something significant in the offing."

I doubt too you would dispute his notion - from the mind of a man who was both a politician and a spy himself - that good intelligence is often if not always wasted on bad government.

My friend the ordinand, now priest, said that he realised the utter truth of his vocation that night as he read the chapter 'Piper at the Gates of Dawn': not the Sermon on the Mount, not the Last Supper, but the quiet pagan joy of Ratty and Mole as they basked in the saving love of their natural deity, that's what made it so right between him and his God.

I bet he reads Buchan. Probably preaches on the man too, much to the consternation of his very own Colonel X. We all have one. It's is God's way.